Christine Negroni riffs on aviation and travel and whatever else inspires her to put words to page.

Monday, October 26, 2015

Don’t Be Spooked if 787 Battery Box is a Smoky Cauldron

Note: This post has been updated with new information from TUI Arkefly.Two years ago, episodes of smoking and sputtering lithium
ion batteries on two Boeing Dreamliners were so horrifying the entire fleet
was grounded for months and the design was the subject of three safety
investigations. But a mysterious transition has occurred, as if a
spell had been put on the folks responsible for safe skies.

Just in time for Halloween and as I reported for Gizmodo,
in the 18 months since Boeing was forced to confine its devilish batteries to a
stainless steel housing so the plane could fly again, several more have
misbehaved, emitting smoke and leading to at least one emergency landing.

A Qatar 787 at the gate in Doha in 2014

And yet, as swift as a witch on a broomstick, the cobalt
oxide lithium ion battery tricks have flown from nightmare to “non-event” according to
Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

"Non-event" or not, Boeing opted to report one instance to the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board. That was the
diversion of a Qatar Airways 787 on October 4, 2014. The plane maker provided the
information under a program intended to encourage the “industry to
share significant safety related information.” The government incites disclosure by
promising details won’t be shared with nosy reporters like me.

News of the battery-related diversion came to me
from someone outside the government who is familiar with the goblins of the
787’s power storage system and who told me that the problem in October was not
the first since the boxes were installed, which I knew, nor was it the most
recent, which I did not know.

Not a 787, but a TUI 737 in Oslo

According to this person, who prefers to remain
in the shadows, a 787 lithium ion ship battery went haywire the week before last, on a
European operator of the 787. I believed and originally reported here that this was the Dutch carrier Arkefly, part of Germany's TUI. But several days after sending questions to their public relations office, spokesperson Kuzey Alexander Esener, told me, "TUI did not experience any battery issue on its 787 aircraft."

Boeing won’t answer any of my questions about
Qatar’s problem (and there may have been two, the one the FAA confirmed in
October, and a previous one in April) or about the one I was told occurred last
week; a curiously defensive position if in fact, this is no big deal.

Don’t be afraid, the FAA says. If the containment box handles the discharge of smoke and fumes, then it
will have “confirmed the effectiveness of the new battery and battery system
design.” That’s what Brown told me.

Well naturally this made me wonder, how do they know
the effectiveness of the box or the extent of the damage to the battery since
neither the FAA nor the NTSB conducted an investigation? They know, Brown told me because Boeing
looked into the matter and said everything was okay.

The 787 assembly plant in South Carolina

Well, how many other events have there been? I asked
Brown to which I received this word-parsing reply.

“The redesigned 787 battery
system has performed as designed during all battery events to date.”

"All battery events"? Okay, so what are the others? I decided to try my question again.“Has the FAA been notified of any other battery events beyond the
JAL in January 2014 and the Qatar event in October?” I asked.

“Christine,
we don’t consider something an ‘event’ if it performs as designed.”

When Boeing announced with a abracadabra!
That its engineering wizardry had solved the problem that had fifty 787s
earthbound for four months in 2013, it might not have been apparent to the flying public
just what that fix would look like but now we know.

Deep in the bowels of the Dreamliner; inside the box
into which the plane’s lithium ion batteries are packed, the cells can boil, boil, toil
and trouble, but travelers have no reason to fear.You decide if that’s a
trick or a treat.